PHI 434—Formal Epistemology

Formal epistemology is the application of formal methods (often quantitative or logically formalized) in order to study belief and knowledge acquisition. The course has three main topics. In the first part of the course, we’ll look at how the notion of a ‘credence’ can better capture our doxastic states than merely qualitative notions of belief and how five core Bayesian principles have been employed and justified in order to reason about how our credences should be determined in light of each other. In the second part of the course, we’ll start to look at inference in science beginning with classical and Bayesian notions of ‘confirmation’ and seeing how various strategies for acquiring knowledge from experiments (such as randomized control trials and observational studies) are supposed to work and how they may be problematic in practice. In the third part of the course, we’ll look more closely at formal strategies for causal inference, learning how to devise and read causal graphs, draw inferences from them on the basis of probabilistic (in)dependencies and query those inferences. We’ll end with a broader discussion of the benefits of intervention into causal systems and the meaning of the counterfactuals in causal reasoning.